1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method of automatically detecting images and text, and then process the images and text separately, especially relates to increase the clarity of both monochrome and color documents when faxing or copying them.
2. Background Description
Nowadays, when people deal with the copying and faxing of color documents (or gray-scale documents), in order to raise the clarity of the copies and reduce the distortion of the copies, they have to process the image and text of the master copy separately because of the different characters of images and text.
For example, when a gray scale document is faxed, it is usually transformed to monochrome mode. When being transformed, the content of the document will not be able to present the original clarity and resolution without distort if the transformation is not done with halftone processing (halftone, including dithering and diffusion), because the content contains both images and text. Moreover, if all content of the document is half toned, the text will be scattered. As a result, traditionally, the images and text will be processed separately.
However, the current processing method which deals with images and text separately, ignores the problem of low speed in order to keep the genuineness and the quality of the copy or fax. That is, the current images and text detection is implemented by hardware, which processes the original images (smear or blur it) and then separates images and text; it costs more to use hardware to process images and takes more time to detect the images and text because of the extra process. Moreover, the current halftone processing takes more transformation time because there are more sampling points and a larger sampling zone.